To the Honorable Members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate:

We the undersigned join together in respectfully urging you to enact legislation that will amend the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) (28 U.S.C. Chapter 171) to allow our members of our military to have a right to pursue a medical malpractice claim, just like any other American has the right to pursue a claim for medical malpractice.

The Feres Doctrine is an antiquated exception to the FTCA that arose from a 1950’s Supreme Court decision that bars claims for “injuries arising out of or [occur] in the course of activit[ies] incident to service”. Feres v. United States (1950) 340 U.S. 135. This draconian law prohibits service members and their families from bringing a medical malpractice claim or wrongful death claim against a military hospital responsible for the injury or ultimate death of the service member.

The main issue that we would like Congress to address with the Feres Doctrine is that the Court’s interpretation has broadened the scope of the exception currently codified in the FTCA to encompass injuries that occur from noncombatant activities in a time of peace. The Feres Doctrine ignores the plain language of the FTCA and has led to unfair, absurd, and inconsistent results that treat service members differently than the rest of us. Most commonly, the Feres Doctrine has been used as an unfair defense that military medical personnel hide behind when such personnel fail to provide the basic care that would save a person’s life just because they are on active duty.

Sgt. First Class (SFC) Richard Stayskal’s story is a perfect example of the inequality that our service members and their families encounter due to the Feres Doctrine. We believe that a result of Fort Bragg Womack Army Medical Center’s failure to notify SFC Stayskal and remove the tumor that was noted on a CT scan taken in January 2017, a 36-year old U.S. Army Special Forces Green Beret now has stage four metastatic cancer and will leave a wife and two young daughters without a father.

Four months after his January 2017 CT scan, SFC Stayskal was rushed to Womack’s Medical Center after exhibiting severe respiratory issues, including coughing up blood. There, the military’s doctors conducted a retrospective review of his January CT scan and noted an abnormality/mass that needed attention and advised that a biopsy be taken. Instead of informing SFC Stayskal and his wife of this or expediting a pulmonary follow-up appointment, Womack discharged SFC Stayskal telling him he had pneumonia. After being told that he would have to wait at least one month to see a pulmonologist on base, SFC Stayskal was finally approved to see a civilian doctor in June 2017 and had a new CT scan taken. It was at that time that he and his family finally found out what was wrong. We believe the failure of the military’s doctor’s gross failure to detect and treat SFC Stayskal’s cancer when they took his first CT scan in January 2017 is the mistake that allowed the aggressive tumor to double in size and metastasize. And now SFC Stayskal and his family have no recourse due to the Feres Doctrine.

This is a very important issue, especially to the military and Veteran communities. We need Congressional intervention to change this unfair doctrine that has stripped hundreds of service members and their families of the same rights that all other citizens of our Country have when it comes to medical malpractice.

Definition of an “iatrogenic” disorder: A disorder inadvertently induced by a health caregiver because of a surgical, medical, drug or vaccine treatment or by a diagnostic procedure.

In last week’s column I wrote that iatrogenic disorders (a doctor-, drug-, vaccine-, surgery- or other medical treatment-caused disorder) were the third leading cause of death in the US. That revelation may have ruffled the feathers of some readers, particularly if they were employed in the medical professions, so I am enlarging on that statement in this week’s column.

In 2000, a commentary article was written by Dr Barbara Stanfield, MD, MPH. It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, July 26, 2000—Vol 284, No. 4).

In the article, Stanfield included the following statistics from her research about iatrogenic deaths. (Note: these numbers do not include out-patient iatrogenic deaths):

12,000 deaths/year from unnecessary surgery in hospitals• 7,000 deaths/year from medication errors in hospitals• 20,000 deaths/year from other errors in hospitals• 80,000 deaths/year from nosocomial infections in hospitals• 106,000 deaths/year from non-error, adverse effects of medications in hospitals

Combining these five groups gives us a total of 225,000 in-patient deaths. The 225,000 number does not include out-patient deaths or disabilities. In any case, this number easily constitutes the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind heart disease and cancer (see the official list for 2015 below).

The CDC’s Mortality and Morbidity Report for 2000, said that cancer caused 710,701 US deaths in 2000 and heart disease caused 553,080. For comparison purposes, the CDC’s report said that heart disease caused 606,401 deaths in 2017 and cancer caused 594,707.

Below are the US death statistics for 2015 (apparently the last year that the CDC has published the complete list). More